but yesterday I read a thread where loads of people were moaning about having to work when essentially their jobs are redundant. Now, I was thinking about this and who would fix roads? who'd work in supermarkets? Who clear your shit up after going to the pictures? Whod fix the electric when it went off? Its exceptionally dangerous to admit your cushy well paid job is meaningless, as they're not going to say "oh, you have no useful skills. Here, have loads of money to just hang out!" while poor people pick up the slack. Or have I missed the point completely?

and i think that she should have been able to get poor starving people to dress up as ducks and swim around in a pond at versailles, then when she fancied she could go down to the pond and throw them bits of stale bread that they could try to catch in their mouth, or squabble over in the water.

relating it to the inequality inherent in current capitalism. Since when has any market system stopped the wealthiest people doing ostentatious gubbins like this? Could argue it's better in this instance - Branson's wealth is the result of meritocracy, not aristocracy. In any case - same as it ever were.

Always amuses me when grossly overpaid columnists (especially ones with nice big houses in South London) warble on about wealth inequality/the behaviour of the super-rich. Not a huge Williams fan at the best of times.

a huge leg up from his parents (family connections, attending Stowe, startup funds, bailing out the fledgling business when it was found to have avoided taxes and duties etc), huge amounts of his wealth have come from carpetbagging contracted out public services, and much of it is maintained via off shore tax avoidance arrangements.

...although she probably pays her fair share of tax. Not sure if she's still fare-dodging on London buses though, will have to check.

Anyway - there's a better article in the stuff you highlight there (about the ethics of Branson's business dealings and tax arrangements) then the one that she's actually chosen to write about (and would make her point better as well). Maybe it's too boring to write about though. Who knows.

I know the Guardian only has about five paid journalists these days, but I'm not sure how she suddenly seemed to jump ahead of Marina Hyde and Hadley Freeman as their all-round-rustle-up-an-opinion-on-anything writer.

I must stop reading about 75% of her columns halfway through. She just never seems to have any coherent train of thought and her use of clauses makes far too many of her paragraphs close to incoherent on first read.

i'm pretty sure it was her who did an article about ched evans. Said something like 'ched evans, like all raapists, will have to deal with the consequences of his actions for the rest of his life'. lolol i dunno it just feels like the guardian want quite a large femenist quota in their comment articles but don't actually know who the good femenists are or what good femenists think and say

She's clearly very smart, but I just don't think she has what it takes to be a quick-response current affairs columnist. It's a difficult talent I know, but Marina Hyde was writing regular football, politics and Lost in Showbiz columns simultaneously for a while and absolutely nailing all three, then she just disappeared.

Just pointing out the inherent flaw in someone who by any normal measure gets paid `too much` complaining about someone else getting paid `too much` and their subsequent behaviour.

Not 100% sure how much Zoe Williams earns but I bet it's around the £80k mark (based on the admittedly modest info I have about what big name columnists bag). Doesn't need to do much other than write a couple of columns a week and do a few media appearances for that either.

could bash any columnist who gets paid a tidy sum for writing about people who spend a tidy sum in a way they disagree with. Better off having a go on the fact that she's used the death of a pilot in the virgin space program as an excuse to regurgitate one of the oldest and most tired arguments ever.

I have no problem with how much any of these individuals get paid. And it is a valid point because it all links into fidel's (strawman, sure) question about how much *should* people get paid and how *should* they behave. And there is no answer to it.

The ultimate consequence is to render Williams' point moot and boring, which brings us back to your conclusion here which hits the nail on the head significantly better than I have.

Is that I find rich people/ corporations spending money trying to develop space technology/travel one of the least objectionable vanity projects that they could pursue. Seems to be taking the argument that if everyone can’t go to space, then no-one should.

Sure there are better things to spend the money on, but as I don’t see the whole current economic system being overthrown anytime soon, I also think its fair point that there are far worse things for companies and individuals to spend their money on.

Also, the point is you can't predict the outcome of technological innovation until you've developed it. so technologies developed for this could be used elsewhere for the advantage of humankind.

rocket fuel is a reaction of hyrdrogen and oxygen. Carbon neutral, produces water.

The production of the equipment and craft is different, but the negative contribution to the environment will be relatively negligable.

Think space travel could potentially be amazing for the human race, but only if faster than light travel was possible (which, as i understand it, hasn't been ruled out except in the conventional sense of a ship moving really really fast. i'm not a quantum physicist though so idk). so i guess getting to grips with regular space travel would be kind of important as 'preparation' for when we'd maybe be able to do really cool stuff in like 100 years...

I think it is valid to question the extremely expensive new luxuries that are developed and then afforded to the very rich, because it then provides an incentive to people to become exceedingly extravagently rich, by using a system that will rely on justifying excessive inequality to the point where you are measuring differences that, when held alongside, are grotesque.
You will find that it is gross inequality and unfairness that can often drive some popular extremism as well, mistakenly directed over the fence at the people on the other side (actions and anger should instead be focused on the 'fences')
So yes, Branson developing a market for the very rich to go on a nice space trip is not a good thing.

'cars'
our whole society is now car fixated, you cannot, uninvent it, you can, if you have sufficient imagination, project how you think society might have evolved if cars were not 'marketed' as 'cool things to have' but merely part of a necessary transport infrastructure. Currently we have vast numbers of people now making huge trips burning up fossil fuel at an unsustanable (and soon to run out) rate. people now rely on travelling further to by at out of town shopping precincts or work far away (non LME centric)
Centralisation relied on cars and more and more public transport.
Without such car promenance there would be less competitiveness it is true. War also fuels competitiveness.

Cars are not used as mere tools. They have become 'the reason' or on of 'the reasons' for many.

I cannot explain to you fully about cars as it will take a long long time for me to detail HOW, the alternatives could have panned out.........but you hve to take it on trust that I COULD go on and on and on to explin possible alterntives in which cars were not marketed so selfishly/shallowly.

you have said something that i did not say because you do not wish to consider what I have said.

To you, and argument or discussion is something to win, to get your point across at any cost, to you, peoples welfare or future wellbeing is not a consideration, to you, argument exists to justify why its ok that there is unfairness and inequlity, and that its ok to continue down paths that will create more unfairness and inequality.
You should try to have some compassion and integrity to that which you wish to discuss.
You should try to be a better person (in your argument.....Im sure you are a fine fellow in real life who is nowhere near as nasty as you post, I am sure you merely post like this just to get a rise out of people who you like to look down on)

but now they have become something that people and society DO rely on, so its clever that you mention such things as cars and phones as they are now irreversably linked to current society in a way that would demand too many words from me to explain (and we all know that I use too many words to be popular enough for current debating)

Mass production (enabled by technological advance......NOT political ideology) is what has enabled the marketing of the above devices to masses.
There are not sufficient resources on earth to offer space flight to the masses.
Indeed there is not sufficient resourced on earth to offer cars for all on earth, or unlimited purile air travel to all on earth, without condemning others to utter misery and utterly spent resources, and a society dependant upon something that will suddenly not be available.

Measured in the small puny lifespan that your mind is capable of considering, these things can be made available, but it is the eqivalent (if you can expand to consider the longer term) of blowing your entire savings in one happy drunken night at a casino.

Perhaps you would like a better example.
Saudi princes might have converted rolls royces to carry their falcons and falconers into the wilds for their 'sport' to buy such luxory, they were happy to pump out the oil at a rate that would mean that it will become exhausted within their grandchildrens lifetime......but dont worry rather than invest in what the people will need for then, they have had expensive rolls royces and private jets to spenf theit money on, and lots of people will e employed in trickle doen jet making jobs and car making jobs.........fuck the people being employed in making things that people will need when stuff runs short and oil becomes a luxory. in fact fuck making it law that all manufactured cars should ne resonably economical and less than sporty and being able to exceed the legal speed limit by a large margin...........LETS ALL CRASH AND BURN IN A GLORIOUS CELEBRATION OF FLASHY SHIT

....I never said i ws against tech.
I am against the way it is marketed........we now have mobile com tech......this is a good and useful thing which could help to obvigate the need for so much resource hungry travel.....but this is not what it is used for mostly.....it is now marketed for people to spend on small upgrades, drip fed.....I realise that it is saidthat this economic activity is necessary to fund the continual research......my point is, if the directors and well paid people in such tech companies were not needing more money to spend on rolexes and going into fucking space, then there would be less need for quite so many upgrade releases (or at least they could have the honesty of not witholding tech from one release just so that they can have something new for a further release)

what I am arguing against here, is not all human activity.
What I am trying to do it to argue against the marketing and development of things that are so niche to be only available to super rich, which then requires one to be superrich to indulge in.

I do not suggest cutting off stuff from people to ensure a draconian 'soviet' style equality.
I suggest that pandering and assisting the development of huge differentials in the resources/opportunities and activities of humans is not a good thing to grow, when there is plenty of opportunity for growth in areas that will benefit humans more as a whole.